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MAGAZINE SHORTLIST
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Footsteps in the Scottish hills
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536j VP Bothy Tales PB_OFC.indd 1
www.v-publishing.co.uk
BOTHY TALES TH
£9.99
BOTHY TALES
In Bothy Tales, the follow-up to The Last Hillwalker from bestselling mountain writer John D. Burns, travel with the author to secret places hidden amongst the British hills and share his passion for the wonderful wilderness of our uplands. From remote glens deep in the Scottish Highlands, Burns brings a new volume of tales – some dramatic, some moving, some hilarious – from the isolated mountain shelters called bothies. Meet the vivid cast of characters who play their games there, from climbers with more confidence than sense to a young man who doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s letting himself in for …
john d. burns
I can
move only with the aid of barrels of anti-inflammatory gel, sticking plasters and real ale anaesthetic. Martin and I descend from hours of walking to the small town of Middleton-in-Teesdale. I walk, stiff legged, into the campsite office and a plump, middle-aged woman looks up from her desk and can see the old timer is in trouble. “Oh, what a shame you weren’t here last week,” she says, pity radiating from behind her hornrimmed specs. “You’ve missed him.” I look at her, puzzled. “Elvis!” she explains. “You missed Elvis.” Oh God, now I’m hallucinating …
J O H N D. B U R N S 25/07/2019 13:48
BOTHY TALES Footsteps in the Scottish hills
JOHN D. BURNS
Vertebrate Publishing, Sheffield www.v-publishing.co.uk
BOTHY TALES
John D. Burns
First published in 2018 by John D. Burns. This edition first published in 2019 by Vertebrate Publishing. VERTEBRATE PUBLISHING Omega Court, 352 Cemetery Road, Sheffield S11 8FT, United Kingdom. www.v-publishing.co.uk Copyright © John D. Burns 2018. Cover design by Mark Thomas. www.coverness.com Edited by Pinnacle Editorial. www.alexroddie.com/pinnacle-editorial John D. Burns has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as author of this work. This book is predominantly a work of non-fiction based on the life of John D. Burns. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of the book are true. Some parts of this book are fictional. The names, characters, places, events and incidents here are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-912560-46-2 (Paperback) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means – graphic, electronic, or mechanised, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems – without the written permission of the publisher. Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologise for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition. Original design and layout by Mark Thomas. www.coverness.com Production by Vertebrate Publishing. www.v-publishing.co.uk Vertebrate Publishing is committed to printing on paper from sustainable sources.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
CONTENTS
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1 22 3 ARE YOU A REAL MAN? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 4 THE UNFORGIVEN MOUNTAINEER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 5 THE NIGHT THE BOTHY BURNED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 6 DRY MAN WALKING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 7 OF FIRE AND MEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 8 OF BOTHIES AND BIKES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 9 WE ARE LEGENDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 10 GELDER SHIEL BOTHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 11 BEN ALDER COTTAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 12 A NIGHT IN TWO-HAT BOTHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 13 A QUIET WORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 14 REQUIEM IN SUTHERLAND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 15 BLACK NORMAN’ S HOUSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 16 NEVER ON SUNDAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 17 THE CHERRY TREE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 18 KING OF KEARVAIG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 19 THE YELLOW-EYED BIRD OF GLEANN DUBH-LIGHE 143 20 FROM MY COLD DEAD HAND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 21 THE MAN FROM THE MINISTRY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 22 FOLK LOST ON THE HILL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 23 THE GHOST BOTHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 ALSO BY JOHN D. BURNS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 SKY DANCE EXTRACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 2
GHOST RIDERS FAINDOURAN
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1 GHOST RIDERS It’s been raining for four days now. Martin and I are saturated. Water has seeped through every layer of our clothing. The arms have fallen off my Pac-A-Mac and my overtrousers are split. I have no defence against the deluge and no alternative but to surrender to the aquatic invasion of my body. Here, on Black Hill on the Pennine Way, Martin and I are nearing exhaustion – the rain batters us mercilessly, the weight of our packs drags us down and the sheer monotony of walking hour after hour every day tests our mental resources to the limit. But it’s not the rain that is our biggest enemy, threatening to bring us to a grinding halt, but a far more formidable foe: the peat. We are trudging knee deep through a soup of saturated black ooze. Every step is torture and forward movement often becomes impossible. Sometimes it holds our boots so fast momentum carries us forward and pitches us face down into the black treacle. Weighed down by our rucksacks, it is impossible to get up – we have to wriggle out of the straps before we can rise to our feet, dripping gunge, like melancholy versions of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. From somewhere out in the mist we hear a cry: “Help!” We find two walkers. One is being devoured by the peat monster; he is already up to his thighs and is sinking slowly. In broken English his friend tells us he is Dutch and all efforts 1
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to move him have failed. It seems odd to me to come all this way to the spine of England to drown in peat – surely he could have done that at home. I grab my European cousin under the armpits and pull. Nothing happens. He is stuck firm; the peat has him in its grip. The ground around him is so liquefied no one else can get close to him and I am sinking too. Martin finds a semi-rotten plank, half embedded in the peat; I stand on it and pull again. Now I heave as hard as I can. “Argh, my back!” the Dutchman yells in pain. I keep pulling. It’s either me or the monster. There is a tortured, gurgling sound from the peat and the Dutchman begins to move. It’s forty years since Martin and I battled the nightmare of peat to complete the Pennine Way. On this winter’s evening, we sit in front of the bothy stove, its heart glowing yellow with burning wood. The whisky and the warmth are taking hold and both of us begin to doze quietly. Outside, a ferocious wind, roaring like a beast untamed, hurls rain at the windows and tears at the roof with its claws. This is Glenpean bothy, at the head of Glen Pean, not far from Fort William, in the Scottish Highlands. Despite the remoteness of this small, stone-built shelter, and the power of the storm raging across the mountains around us, Martin and I sit before the fire in the flickering candlelight enjoying a warm glow of contentment, certain in the knowledge that there is nothing too seriously wrong with the world. Four miles away, Loch Arkaig – the enormous strip of water 2
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that snakes its way down the glen, its lochside road our only exit – is swallowing thousands of tonnes of rain. The rivers have become torrents and spouts of white water plummet down the mountainsides and tumble into the loch all along its length. Swollen by the floods, the loch is rising, bursting its banks. Soon it will drown the little single-track road that runs beside it. By morning we will be marooned. That human beings are blind to the disasters about to befall them is a blessing – if we all knew our fate life would be a grim waiting game. Martin and I have known each other since primary school, which means I’ve been seeing his aquiline features on and off for more than fifty years. In the early 1970s we both walked the Pennine Way. Somehow, barely equipped, vastly inexperienced and way out of our depth, we completed the 268-mile walk. This evening, while our friend Joe (a newcomer we have only known for a little shy of fifty years) snores on the sleeping bench of the bothy, Martin and I relive the walk. We laugh at how poorly equipped we were; we had rudimentary rucksacks, no waterproofs to speak of and a tent made of bed sheets. Martin didn’t even have any boots. He completed the walk in street shoes. We look back fondly on one of our first independent ventures into the hills with the nostalgia of old men remembering their youth. I can’t remember which of us said it, but the words, once spoken, hung in the air and brought me back to reality with a start. “Well, we could do it again,” one of us suggested and, as the storm railed outside the bothy, we both fell silent.
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My first book, The Last Hillwalker, ended with me and Martin sitting in that Highland bothy and deciding – for reasons neither of us is too clear about – to attempt the Pennine Way again. I have been amazed by readers’ reactions to my first book. It has become a bestseller, and more importantly struck a chord with outdoor folk. In the book I tried to tell the story of the average hillwalker, of their love of the hills, of their lives and adventures, and it seems that, to some extent at least, I achieved this. Rather than being satiated by writing The Last Hillwalker, my fascination with the landscape of the Highlands and the folk who wander these hills has deepened. When I am not chained to my PC, writing, I am exploring this wonderful land at every opportunity. When I finished my first book I realised I had more tales I wanted to tell. Some of these stories are factual accounts; others come more from the flights of a fanciful imagination. I’ll leave you to decide which is which. A lot of people asked what happened to me and Martin on the Pennine Way, forty years after our first completion, so here’s the story of our second attempt. * * * I’ve been walking for a long time, so long that it’s difficult to remember a time when I wasn’t walking. My past life has faded into oblivion. I have become a simple organism. All I do is walk. I no longer think – thought has become an inconvenience. I just move my legs and strike the ground with my trekking poles in a perpetual rhythm that drives me ever onwards. Martin and I have been walking for almost twelve hours. Twenty miles lie behind us since we set off just after 8 a.m. 4
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from the paradise of our campsite in Crowden. Johnny Cash’s song ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ is playing on a continuous loop through my mind. In the song he tells of ghostly cowboys, condemned to ride across endless skies in pursuit of a herd they will never catch. It feels like me and Martin walking across endless moorland in search of a trail end we will never reach. It’s May, but as we walk mile after mile across this high, empty moorland a ceaseless, cold easterly wind blows into our faces, gently but relentlessly pushing us back. It’s been blowing this way for weeks and has desiccated the rolling peat landscape. Now it drains us of energy. The effort it takes to push against it is the equivalent of a couple of miles each day. An hour ago we passed the White House pub on this, our second day on the Pennine Way. Martin turned to me as we set off on this section that leads, past a series of reservoirs, to the village of Mankinholes. “This section is five miles long, but don’t worry, it’s flat. The easiest on the whole Way.” Martin is an authority on the route by now. Over the years he has repeated many of the sections we walked in our youth. He knows every twist and turn, but this section does not feel easy now. My legs remember the previous day’s battle – setting out from Edale, over Kinder Scout and the dreaded Bleaklow moor. Forty years ago Martin and I crossed that moor in mist and pouring rain, floundering through a black soup of peat bog. If you want to know what Bleaklow is like the clue is in its name. There was something unnerving about standing on the station platform in Edale where we had begun this walk half a lifetime ago. Then I felt differently. I was excited, elated, 5
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about what was to come. I was filled with the boundless energy and optimism of youth. I didn’t know what I was about to face, although, at nineteen, I was sure we could defeat whatever was ahead of us. Standing there all those years later, I knew what was ahead and the prospect filled me with dread. I know now what I did not know then: we were about to meet a monster. The Pennine Way begins in Edale and is the big daddy of British long-distance walking routes. Back in 1974, when I walked the route with Martin, it had only been open a few years and stood alone as the longest, toughest walk in the UK. Now there is a plethora of coastal paths, Trails and Ways. Some are wild and remote like the Cape Wrath Trail; others longer, but broken into many short sections such as the South West Coast Path. None, however, can claim the status of the Pennine Way. Covering 268 miles and running up the spine of Britain, it took an Act of Parliament to create as it forced its way north, often against the opposition of landowners. Martin and I head across the dams where the open reservoirs offer no shelter from the wind. I come to a halt. Across our path is a wire fence and a little sign saying ‘diversion’. Clearly some work is being carried out on the dam, and the contractors, steeped in health and safety, want us to take the long way around the lake. Normal walkers would have happily plodded off around the rough track and taken the extra half mile in their stride. I, however, am too tired to consider an extra hundred yards. Diggers sit silently on the other side of the fence, their drivers long since gone off for their tea, no doubt sitting in various hostelries across the county. I am unable to see anything capable of dealing sudden death and begin to climb the fence. 6
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But halfway up, I realise that I am not nineteen any more as middle-aged legs, tired from walking, struggle to propel me over the barrier. It’s now that I remember I am over sixty and overweight. I had planned to diet before the walk – to at least lose a little of my paunch – but I put it off and, a few weeks before, decided it was too late to do anything and kept eating the pies. Now it’s time to pay. Martin watches in silence as I teeter precariously on the high wire. He has developed a strategy over the years: he lets me go first, and if I cross the river/bog/mountain ridge without getting killed, he follows. On the odd occasion when I have slipped off stepping stones and fallen waist deep in the water he quietly heads off to find a safer route. Since I don’t die on this particular occasion we both climb the fence and head off across the dam. At last, our second day, one of the longest on the route, slowly comes to an end as we descend with aching legs towards the little village of Mankinholes. I find Joe sitting comfortably in the bar, waiting for us geriatric walkers to stagger off the moor. After so many hours of walking, exposed to the wind and plodding through bog, it feels odd to suddenly experience the shelter of walls and be surrounded by people who have not been walking for so long they have become automatons. Martin reaches for the menu and I head for the bar to buy a much-needed round of drinks. When I return, Martin is standing panic stricken on his chair while the pub’s Jack Russell hovers for dropped chips beneath our table. Martin has an irrational fear of dogs (and all other animals for that matter). He is fervently of the belief that animals are 7
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about to come snarling at him and inflict the most fearful injuries. The size of the creature is immaterial; he is certain that anything bigger than a hamster is capable of grievous bodily harm. Thus the innocent Jack Russell, in search of an illicit snack, sends him into a panic. Joe and I have learned to accept this and realise that no amount of rational explanation will reassure him. The overweight pub manager regards Martin’s antics with rising alarm until we explain his phobia. Then he merely shakes his head and looks on, bemused. Eventually, Martin having survived the attack of the monstrous chip-eating Jack Russell, we head off for a campsite. On our first trek up Britain’s spine Martin and I carried a rudimentary tent, as we had no money to buy anything better. Now, in the luxury of middle-aged wealth, Joe possesses a small camper van and – in an act of incredible generosity – is following along our route, bringing our luggage and the facilities of his little home from home along with him. The van is too small for us all to sleep in so Joe has erected tents for me and Martin. I sleep on my top-of-the-range air mattress, cosy in my down bag and immensely grateful that I am not shivering in the inadequate equipment of my teenage years. The Victorians were very fond of big pointy things. So fond that they have littered the English countryside with them. Not content with the height of the hills around them, the Victorians made many of them higher by sticking a pointy thing on top. Often, they made them memorials to some war, but that’s not the real reason they are there. The Victorians built them just because they could. Often it was the landed gentry who put them there. Mainly so that, after dinner during brandy 8
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and cigars, they could gesture across the landscape and explain that they were responsible for that marvellous pointy thing on the horizon. Next morning, my legs are startled. They have just walked two consecutive long days, and fancy a lie-in while I read the papers. Unfortunately, that’s not what they get. They are woken, rather rudely, and forced into boots again. Soon they are climbing the little path that leads out of the village of Mankinholes and up to Stoodley Pike where Martin and I staggered from the Pennine Way late last night. The path up from the valley is unlike anything I’ve seen before. It is paved and the paving stones gently curve into each other, so they have a kind of natural fit. It’s almost pleasant to walk on and doesn’t jar with the landscape as so many paved paths do. As Martin and I crest the ridge the east wind meets us head on. It’s been waiting for us all night and now tries, with all its vigour, to push us back to Edale. Soon we are sheltering in one of the little alcoves in the memorial at the top of Stoodley Pike. The memorial is one of the pointy things I mentioned before. It is possible to climb the steps inside it and gain an even higher elevation but neither Martin nor I feel like adding unnecessary ascent – we already have a great deal of climbing ahead of us. The memorial was built in 1814 by public subscription. About forty years later, wind, rain and a fair clout of lightning demolished it. The Victorians – nothing if not determined – built it back up again, only this time they had the bright idea of putting a lightning conductor in it and so here it stands today. “We are heading over there,” Martin tells me, pointing into the distance with his walking pole. 9